"Cuss my fool hide!" he whispered. "Mebby he did see something! Mebby somebody come up th' trail, tryin' to get out of th' valley before daylight! Mebby it wasn't Ben at all that did th' shootin'! Hey, Ben; Ben! For heaven's sake, say something, anything!"
Gates, stung into a blinding rage which swept aside every thought of caution, did say something. Nature seemed to shrink from the stream of throbbing profanity which came shouting up out of the black canyon, whose granite walls flung it back and forth until the chasm reverberated with it.
Harrison listened, entranced, his open mouth, refusing to shut, testifying to the great awe which held him spellbound. Never in all his sinful life had he heard such a masterpiece of invective, epithet, and profane invocation. The words seemed to be alive and writhing with venom; he almost could hear them crackle in the air. He heard himself called everything uncomplimentary which a frontier vocabulary saved for just such situations. He heard his ancestors described back to the time of Adam; sweeping up to the present, himself, his relatives, his ambitions, habits, and personal belongings were dissected by the man below. And then his future and the prophesied future abode of his spirit were probed and riddled and described by a furious, vitriolic tongue. His hair, eyes, ears, nose, gait, and manners were gathered up and torn apart for microscopic examination and the descriptions were shouted at the top of his companion's voice, which bellowed and boomed, rasped and coughed, screeched and shrilled down in the blackness forty feet below him. Then there fell a sudden calm, a silence which seemed doubly silent, unreal, because of the contrast. A convulsive, retching, strangling fit of coughing broke it, and then a hoarse, rasping voice asked mildly, anxiously, a mild question:
"Is there anything I forgot?"
Johnny, standing up behind the smaller bowlder that he might not lose a word or an inflection of the masterpiece, lost in admiration, forgetful of purpose and the situation, danced gleefully and gave a joyous shout: "Not a cussed thing!"
Harrison fired at the sound, and a sharp, lurid flash replied to his own. He staggered back as he fired again, and an answering flash doubled him up. Gamely he pulled the trigger again and two spurts of flame, so close to each other that they seemed almost to merge, sent him staggering and reeling toward the edge of the canyon. Tripping over an inequality in the earth he threw out his arms, fought to regain his balance and with a sob plunged over the wall into the darkness below.
Down on the trail Gates muttered in sudden horror as he felt the wind of the hurtling body, and he leaned against the wall, white, sick, shaken. A muffled, sickening sound came up from the pit, and Gates dropped to his hands and knees, not daring to stand erect.
"Nat!" he cried. "Nat! Was that you? Nat! Nat!"
At the top of the trail a rapier-like flash of fire split the darkness, and then a series of lurid spurts of flame stabbed in short jets, rapidly, regular as the ticking of a clock, marking the place where two heavy guns crashed and jumped as they poured forth a stream of lead down the narrow rock shelf that formed the precarious trail. The canyon roared in one prolonged reverberation and the bullets whined and spatted and screamed in high falsetto as they cleared the wall or struck it to glance out into the valley below.
Gates, on his hands and knees, shaken, sick with horror, crept slowly downward, oblivious to the crashing, rolling thunder and the flying lead.